Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Review: 1/72 First to Fight TKS Tankette

In this post I will review the new Polish TKS Tankette in 1/72 scale by First to Fight miniatures. This tankette is a tiny little tank with a two man crew. It was used at the start of World War 2 in the defence of Poland from the German invasion. This model is made by the Polish company First to Fight and is made of hard plastic. In this article I will review the parts of the model, assembly and painting. This model was provided to me free of charge by First to Fight miniatures for the purpose of this review.

The TKS Tankette is comes with one sprue with one tank on it in each box. From what I can see online, the model costs around $6 US dollars. The box includes an exploded diagram showing how to assemble the model (much appreciated!), the history of the model, and a picture showing a possible paint scheme (which I used as this was one of the factory standard patterns for the early war period).

Very helpful painting and assembly guides.

Some historical background.

Each box contains one sprue with all of the parts needed to build the tankette and a small tube of plastic glue. The plastic of the model glues together using standard plastic glues. The sprues are well laid out and showed no problems with the casting. The detail on the model was very fine with lots of detail on the rivets, tracks, and panel lines.

Note the 1 piece tracks and that the hull is only 2 pieces. Very quick to assemble.

Great detail on the hull.

Track detail is good. Sprue attachment points are hard to clean.

Assembly of the model was straightforward. The assembly guide on the box showed where everything went. All of the parts went together easily on the model with no visible gaps. I found it quite difficult to remove the gun barrel, shovel, and barrel rod (?) from the sprue (the thin pieces at the bottom right in the image below). All are very thin and I was unable to completely clean off the pieces where they met the sprue. In my opinion, the shovel and barrel rod could be moulded onto the hull of the model without much loss of detail. As a gaming piece, the gun barrel is also very thin and fragile. It would be nice to have a slightly thicker barrel as I am not sure this one would survive any rough treatment.

Notice the size and attachment of the gun barrel and barrel cleaning rod.

Despite being a larger scale, the tankette looks tiny next to a 1:100 scale Plastic Soldier Company Panzer IV.

The model painted up nicely. The rivet details were quite small and it was hard to neatly wash around them. I didn't have any issues with paint adherence or anything. I painted the pattern from the box as the information I found suggested this would have been most common at the start of World War 2.

Overall: 4/5The Good
-easy and fast assembly
-great detail on the hull (panels and rivets)
-few pieces for the hull
-1 piece tracks
-assembly and painting guide on the box
-good price
-very nice detail on the tracks

The Bad
-fiddly assembly on the shovel and barrel cleaning rod could easily be avoided by casting the detail on the hull
-no option for an open hatch for a tank commanderThe Ugly
-hard to remove the barrel, shovel, and cleaning rods from the sprue without damaging them

This model was pretty easy to assemble and looks really nice when it is all painted. I would recommend this model to anyone looking for the Polish TKS Tankette model in 1/72 scale. The quality of the model was very high with just a few areas that could be improved on future releases. I would give this model a 4/5 overall.

Have you painted or assembled this model? Any questions about the model? Add your thoughts in the comments section below!

I'm going to take an army up and maybe some Warhammer. Haven't played much X-wing recently, but the basic game is pretty fun. Three x-wings can be a respectable 100 point squadron and is pretty cheap. Imperials can definitely be more expensive. It's more of an alternate game though. Simple rules and no painting.